A Lesson in Charity
by adaon45
Summary: Spoilers for Deathly Hallows. Responding to Charity Burbage's death, Snape finds in her life inspiration to help him cultivate the quality for which she is named.
1. Kindness and Betrayal

A Lesson in Charity

_Disclaimer: Do I wish I had J. K. Rowling's imagination? Yes. Do I? No. These characters are hers—I am simply getting to know them better._

Chapter One: Kindness and Betrayal

He thought the retching would never stop.

What little food and drink he had taken that day had long since come up, followed by bitter yellow bile that stung the back of his throat. Now he was racked by aftershocks of dry heaves that seemed to split him in two. Perhaps that was appropriate: as a double agent he had, after all, suffered that emotional state for many years.

Finally, the nausea subsided enough to allow him to sink, exhausted, onto the cool floor in front of the toilet. He splayed, inky robes billowing around him, one cheek pillowed on black and white tiles as dingy as everything else in the house he'd inherited from his working-class Muggle father.

He heard a scrabbling at the door, like the furtive burrowing of some small animal. Wormtail, no doubt, though probably in his human, rather than verminous Animagus, incarnation; the fellow scarcely needed to transform, Snape thought savagely, he already was a rat. Wormtail had been one of the few Death-Eaters attending the meeting at Malfoy Manor who had genuinely enjoyed the evening's entertainment. While even some of the more hard-bitten had turned green, and Draco Malfoy had—much to Voldemort's amusement—actually thrown up on his parents' splendid Oriental rug, Wormtail sat at the edge of his chair, his flabby little jowls quivering with excitement as he watched Nagini savoring her supper. Now, no doubt, the quisling was spoiling to carry back tales about Snape to Voldemort: did you know, my Lord, that your supposedly trustworthy servant—the one you favor because he killed your most hated foe a few weeks ago—was in fact sickened by what he saw tonight? How faithful can he really be, my Lord, if he can't stand the sight of a Muggle-lover getting her just desserts? Desserts—Snape winced at the word, with its double meaning of food.

Well, Wormtail would be frustrated. Upon rushing into the bathroom at Spinner's End upon his return from the meeting—he barely made it before the vomiting began—Snape had nonetheless managed to invoke the Muffliato charm he'd invented long ago, which filled the ears of would-be eavesdroppers with a gentle buzzing noise. Just to be on the safe side, too, Snape thought that once he emerged he'd Confund the little rodent. Bewitched, Wormtail would have no idea that Snape had done anything so treasonous as be upset by the fate of Charity Burbage. He would never know, Snape thought as a tear scalded his cheek, that the Head of Slytherin House—bastion of purebloods—was secretly mourning a Muggle Studies teacher. And his own unwilling complicity in her murder.

_Severus! Help me! _

Hauling himself to his feet, Snape leaned heavily against the porcelain sink and gazed at his reflection in the spotty mirror. The black eyes into which the pleading Charity had gazed several hours ago were wells of darkness, their depths unreadable. Yet his tear-streaked face, twisted in pain and self-revulsion, was no longer the impassive mask it had been when she vainly begged him to help her.

_Severus . . . please . . . please . . . _

To his horror she used the same words that Dumbledore had addressed to him only a few weeks ago on the Astronomy tower. For an instant he seemed to hear both voices, Dumbledore's and Charity's, and be pierced simultaneously by two pairs of importunate eyes, the blue ones of the old wizard and the green ones of the witch ignominously dangling upside-down over the Malfoys' burnished dining-room table. Gold-flecked, moss-green, Charity's eyes were not—had not been—the brilliant emerald of Lily Evans's, but in their friendly way they reminded Snape of his former best friend's nonetheless. And the faint laugh lines etched around Charity's eyes—Lily would surely have had them too, had she lived as long. There had been nothing for Charity to laugh at this evening, of course; the eyes that frantically searched for his while her body twisted above the table were dilated with fear like a trapped animal's. And yet, before this last day of her life—not so brief as Lily's, but still too brief—Charity Burbage had loved to laugh.

Hadn't her eyes been filled with laughter on another day he could not help remembering? That November day, several years earlier, in the Hogwarts's teachers' lounge?

"Want one?"

Snape glanced from the proferred tin—filled with what looked like brownies—to the youngish brown-haired woman in the nearby armchair who held it invitingly toward him. She was his sole companion in the lounge, not that he had acknowledged her recent entrance other than to nod curtly in her direction. Now, however, Snape looked straight into those friendly, moss-green eyes—and was surprised to find himself doing so. For all that he was used to impaling students, and others he wished to intimidate, with his fierce dark stare, Snape rarely met people's eyes in social encounters. To do so fit neither his morbidly introverted personality nor the persona of morally ambiguous devotee of the Dark Arts he assumed at Dumbledore's behest. As far as keeping in character, indeed, it would have been unwise for the haughty head of Slytherin House to befriend a Muggle Studies teacher, even had he been so inclined; but then he had never any difficulty being as standoffish with Charity as with his other colleagues. She, however, was serenely gracious with him, though she had never made any personal overtures before today.

"Do have one," Charity now urged, placing the brightly colored tin on the side table separating their two armchairs. "My mum insists on sending them, no matter how often I tell her not to. It's not that I need fattening up," she added, glancing ruefully at her plumpish figure. "You, on the other hand . . . " she continued, "Well, Severus, I hope you don't mind my saying so, but you really could use some more meat on your bones."

Surely no one beside Dumbledore would dare make such a comment; surely, too, Snape would normally greet whoever did with the politeness of a Blast-Ended Skrewt. Yet somehow Charity disarmed him with her down-to-earth, unselfconscious kindness—for, despite her light tone, the green eyes were concerned. And she was right to be: the already-thin Potions Master was growing alarmingly gaunt. It was November of the year of the Triwizard Tournament, and the stress that had encircled Snape for years, that had worsened steadily since Harry Potter had come to Hogwarts, was like an iron band constricting his chest, pressing on his heart, his lungs, ruining a never-robust appetite and banishing sleep. The Dark Lord was coming back; of course there had been that business with Quirrell, but this fall the Dark Mark on Snape's arm—that hateful reminder of his worst sins and errors—had started to twinge ominously, burning blacker as it did. And so in the middle of these autumn nights, when he let down his guard ever so slightly, Snape would often find himself in the bathroom vomiting in anxiety. He had done so last night, in fact, and had only dragged himself through the morning by barking even more sharply than usual at his Potions students.

He looked down at the tin of brownies and, as in a dream, reached out and took one. As Charity beamed encouragingly, he bit into it.

It was ambrosia.

That was the only word to describe the taste. No wonder they used chocolate to buck one up after a Dementor attack. But this was not only chocolate; it was divine chocolate, rich, moist, dark, suffused with a hint of sun-warmed fruit—raspberry, perhaps?

He devoured it.

"Good, isn't it?" Charity asked. "Whatever else you say about my mum—and you can say a lot—she's a great cook." She took another brownie from the tin and matter-of-factly handed it to him. He took it and inhaled it as quickly as the first. He stretched out his arm for a third, then hesitated.

"Don't worry," said Charity, as if she read his mind. "I won't tell anyone else you took it from _me_." She ever-so-slightly emphasized the last word and smiled impishly. "It will be our little secret."

With a few flicks of her wand she wrapped a generous selection of brownies in brown paper and floated them in his direction. Still feeling like he was dreaming, he tucked them into an inner pocket of his robes.

Later he realized he had not said thank you. In fact, he had not said a word during the entire episode.

Charity Burbage had never spoken to him directly again. Yet whenever they passed in the halls, or if by chance their eyes met during a staff meeting, an almost imperceptible smile twitched her lips. For an instant, scarcely the span of a heartbeat, she would look at him with an amused recognition—and then away again, though she still seemed to be enjoying that secret knowledge.

He found it strange. As the Muggle Studies teacher and an outspoken defender of Muggles—the otherwise gentle Charity could wax hot on the subject of anti-Muggle prejudice—he thought she would distrust any Slytherin. Once, indeed, a year after the incident with the brownies, he had entered the teacher's lounge to hear her holding forth indignantly on certain Slytherins—Draco Malfoy among them—whom she had heard flinging the word "Mudblood" at Muggle-born students. When Snape came in she had glanced at him briefly before returning to her diatribe. It was not the look Snape would have expected: he might have thought to see a flash of anger or accusation directed at one who, as head of the offending students' house, could well have nurtured their bigotry. And yet he could swear the look she had given him held neither of those emotions. Yes, it had been a warning—_you __are__ watching out for these messed-up kids, aren't you, Severus?—_but a warning made in the confidence that he would follow through on his responsibilities. Could that be right, or was he simply hoping against hope that she did not hate him?

Or could she know? Know, that is, the secret supposedly only known to himself and Dumbledore, that despite the purposeful ambiguity of his role as double agent, he really was Voldemort's foe?

Could Dumbledore have told her? Could she have figured it out herself? She seemed so unerringly to trust him, when even the members of the Order of the Phoenix held him at arm's length, their eyes wary. The only eyes that looked at him that trustingly were Dumbledore's.

And so, during one of his evening meetings with the headmaster in his office, he asked the old man about Charity. He was worried: if it was so easy to unravel the layers of ambiguity, dark as his billowing robes, with which he wrapped himself, it would be impossible for him to fool enough people (not to mention Voldemort) about his true allegiances.

His fear made him sound irked with the headmaster, who, he implied, must have revealed too much of Snape's history to a fellow teacher. Dumbledore brushed aside this rudeness with his usual equanimity.

"I have not betrayed you, Severus," he pointed out mildly as he leafed through an issue of _Transfiguration Today_. "I have never broken my promise to hide the best of you from others. People may make their assumptions about your loyalties, of course; many might choose to hope you have truly renounced the Dark Arts because of your actions at the school these past few years. Yet even now you are managing wonderfully at keeping people guessing—and raising people's suspicions. In any event, Charity knows no more about you than anyone else."

"She seems so certain about me, though," Snape had persisted. "And why would a Muggle Studies teacher like _me_?"

Dumbledore put down _Transfiguration Today _on his desk, the cover photo of a wizard changing a teapot into a Komodo dragon shimmering as the transformation replayed itself. "Maybe," he said gently, "she remembers a Slytherin boy who, during her last few years at Hogwarts, befriended a Muggle-born student." Indeed, Charity had graduated Hogwarts when Snape was in his third year, when he and Lily Evans were still friends.

"She knows I became a Death-Eater later," Snape replied harshly. "Or, at least, she's heard the rumors. And I'm Head of the house with more anti-Muggle bigots than any other."

Dumbledore nodded. "Yes, Severus, all this is true. Yet Charity is aptly named. She presumably sees you as someone in need of the kindness she possesses in such abundance."

"I need no charity!" The words flew out of Snape's mouth before he could realize their double meaning. His hackles were up, the more so because he came from a background where his family probably looked like they could use a handout.

"Do you not?" Dumbledore questioned, a steely note now underlying his mild tone. "If you do not require charity, Severus, you are one of the few in that condition." He picked up his magazine again but did not open it. "It does not help, of course, that for many `charity' has come to mean condescending pity. This is not the kind of charity Charity Burbage practices. Hers is the more authentic version. Isn't charity, after all, just another word for love?" His tone was now wistful, as if he were pondering some past failure of his own. "How does it go? `Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things . . . Love never fails." Smiling a little sadly, he looked up at Snape. "Do not fear, Severus. Charity will not betray you."

But I betrayed her, thought Snape as he lay sleepless in his dank bedroom at Spinner's End a year and a half later. At least she died thinking that I did—and isn't that just as bad?

He had spotted the prisoner at once upon entering the Malfoys' drawing room with Yaxley, not that it would have been easy to overlook the body dangling upside-down like a hunk of butcher's meat. It took him several seconds to register who it was, but when he did the hands hidden in the folds of his robes clenched convulsively.

He had been expecting it. Charity was the sort of witch the Death-Eaters wanted to make examples of. A pureblood who, like Arthur Weasley, was fascinated by Muggles, she taught children of wizarding backgrounds about their ways with tolerance and enthusiasm. Having lived herself among Muggles for several years after graduating Hogwarts—even concealing her identity as a witch to take a job in a Muggle school—Charity saw no significant difference between Muggles and wizards. To her Muggles were not subhuman or inferior beings; they had simply not inherited magic genes, just as some people had not inherited a certain eye or hair color. For Voldemort and his followers, these views were rankest treason, all the more so since she had been hired by Dumbledore to teach them to new generations of wizards. It had been only a matter of time before she was targeted for extermination.

And then there had been the recent letter to the editor in _The Daily Prophet_. So like Charity to write it. As the wizarding world reeled from the death of Albus Dumbledore and attacks by Death-Eaters on Muggle-borns intensified, she penned an impassioned denunciation of bigotry: _"in all conscience we must renounce this pathological obsession with blood purity and affirm solidarity with our fellow human beings. . . Mixture with Muggle culture, whether by learning about it, having Muggle friends, or intermarriage, is to the good if it causes the wizarding world to evolve beyond pureblood prejudice, a prejudice rooted, like all forms of intolerance, in ignorance and fear of a demonised group." _

Snape groaned when he read the letter. He admired her courage and eloquence, but he knew what her public stance would mean to Voldemort and in what heightened danger Charity now stood. He had wanted to warn her—anonymously, of course—but upon doing discreet research discovered she was no longer at Hogwarts or even traceable to the homes of relatives. Had someone convinced her to go into hiding? Or had she already been assassinated?

And then he saw her hanging above the Malfoys' table. She was unconscious, her face bruised and bloodied; she had presumably put up a fight before being captured. She was a talented witch. But it had been probably at least four against one . . .

Estimating these odds reminded Snape of James Potter and his gang, who had always pounced upon him when he was alone. Four against one. Grotesquely, Charity's captors had used Snape's own spell, Levicorpus, to hoist her upside-down in mid-air, just as James had done after the Defense Against the Dark Arts O.W.L. when he had exposed Severus's grayish underwear to a crowd of sniggering students. At least Charity's tormentors had not thought to humiliate her in that way. Dressed in Muggle jeans and a shirt, now torn and bloody, she had either not been wearing robes when abducted or been stripped of them before being suspended. But at least the Death-Eaters could not now jeer at her underwear. Sheer oversight, surely: it was the type of indignity they loved to inflict on their victims.

In his dark bedroom Snape recalled that one of his first thoughts upon seeing Charity had been to fear the role he would be asked to play in her death. Would this be the day his double-agent game was finally up? Would he end the evening strung up beside his former colleague?

These fears had been the swords hanging over Snape's head for years. While he was willing to do certain things as Dumbledore's spy—things that were admittedly morally ambiguous—other actions he refused to perform. He had killed Dumbledore at Dumbledore's orders, because the headmaster was dying anyway from a curse and was willing to sacrifice himself to convince Voldemort of Snape's allegiance (fearing death so much himself, the Dark Lord would not suspect that anyone would _voluntarily_ seek it). And, had Voldemort commanded Snape to kill Charity himself, he would have seen it, like Dumbledore's death, as a type of euthanasia, a way of sparing her worse treatment since there was no way to save her. But what if Voldemort had asked Snape to torture Charity to death, or watch others do so?

In that year of the Triwizard Tournament, he had told Dumbledore, "There are things I will not do, even for Lily's cause. She would not have wanted me to commit atrocities in her name."

"Of course not, Severus," the old man reassured him. "I will never ask you to blacken your soul in that way."

He had not added "more than it is already," but Snape mentally supplied the omission.

And here he was, on a particularly vital mission, supplying Voldemort with information about Harry Potter's transfer from the Dursleys while simultaneously undermining the success of the inevitable Death-Eater attack. "You must offer Voldemort further proof of your loyalty," Dumbledore had urged from his brand-new portrait in the headmaster's office, "or he will become suspicious that you did not know of the Order's change of dates in moving Harry."

And so together they had concocted a fiendishly Machiavellian scheme, the plot of the Seven Potters. Coached by Snape while Confunded, Mundungus Fletcher urged the Order of the Phoenix to use Polyjuice Potion to send six Potter-look-alikes from Privet Drive along with the real one. And Dumbledore had begged Snape "Try to stay in Lord Voldemort's good books a little longer, Severus. He will surely appoint you Headmaster of Hogwarts and I need you to curb the worst excesses of his other appointees."

"I know it is difficult for you," Dumbledore continued, "to convince the Death-Eaters you are on their side while actually doing your best to defeat them."

_You have no idea, old man_, Snape had thought mutinously, as he often did in response to Dumbledore's impossible demands. _You have no idea. You have no idea how hard it is to look and sound like a Death-Eater but not in fact act like one. You have no idea what it's like to feel the suspicious eyes of Wormtail and Bellatrix Lestrange trained on your every move as they yearn to prove to Voldemort how much more faithful they are to him than you. You have no idea what it's like to walk the knife edge of mortal danger every second of your life, never knowing which day might be your last should Voldemort glimpse just one of the hundreds of memories that could betray you, and which would subject you to a protracted and creatively painful death. You have no idea what it's like to fear that you will have pretended to be complicit with evil only, finally, to fail to destroy it. You don't have a clue, do you?_

Of course, he suspected that Dumbledore did have some clue. But he could never truly know the ache of the constant stress under which Snape labored. And he could never know the terror that gripped Snape when he imagined the kinds of choices he might be called upon to make. And the temptations. It would only be too easy to kill and torture while telling himself he was just keeping up his cover. And yet it would also be sheerest agony to expose himself by refusing to follow one of Voldemort's commands. There was the natural fear of pain and death, but even worse the knowledge he would be failing Lily, and the goodness she had always embodied.

And, besieged as always by these fears, he had walked into Malfoy Manor and seen Charity Burbage strung up for execution. Voldemort's eyes bored into Snape as he took the reserved seat next to him, apparently the Dark Lord's right-hand man but still very much under suspicion. After all, those red eyes could the more easily probe Snape's mind if he were close by.

Snape had calmly returned Voldemort's scrutiny, even as the other Death-Eaters shuddered away from feeling merely the refracted heat from that blast-furnace gaze.

For, agitated as Snape was upon recognizing Charity, he had, with his usual almost superhuman strength, shoved grief, fear, and guilt inside a barred corner of his brain—a corner not unlike his dungeons in the depths of Hogwarts. The bars of this internal dungeon were forged of an emotion that would have surprised the students he hectored in his Potions classes. Maybe it was the torment he had endured from James Potter and Sirius Black and his own father; maybe it was the memory of Lily's daring to stand up for him, but when Snape saw Voldemort and the Death-Eaters gloating over their victims an incandescent rage at the bullies consumed and enobled him. That this rage was mixed with self-revulsion at his own poor choices in his youth made it the more potent—and the more controlled and channelled into covert rebellion. It was this pure and holy anger, as carefully calibrated as the flames beneath a cauldron brewing the trickiest of potions, that enabled Snape to close off his mind from the Dark Lord's probing; that allowed him, when Voldemort asked "Do you recognize our guest, Severus?," to sneer convincingly and watch impassively, all the while thinking, undetected, _Charity, you, like Lily, will have justice. Alas, I cannot save you, but I will do all in my power to defeat your tormentors. I promise._

But she had been no more able to read his mind than Voldemort, had she? What had she thought in those last terrible moments of her life? _Severus, please . . . _ Had she still trusted him despite the pain she must have felt upon hearing of his role in Dumbledore's death? Had she imagined that he could somehow rescue her, that he had the power to vanquish a roomful of Death-Eaters and Voldemort himself? How had she interpreted Snape's silence in response to her anguished pleas?

Oh, Snape could tell himself that he had done what he could. He had tried to warn her after the letter in the _Prophet_, after all; he could not save her, but neither had he tortured her or performed _Avada Kedavra _himself. And, by not exposing his true identity, he made it possible someday to bring about Voldemort's downfall.

Yet all this seemed small comfort, a web of rationalization to cloak his role in augmenting the agony of her end. So if he had not tortured her with the Cruciatus curse, had he not still tormented her with the knowledge that she had been wrong about him? Had it not been agony to believe that the man she had trusted, to whom she had fed comfort food—to whom she had been simply kind—had been a Death-Eater all along? What had it felt like, to know that her charity had been thrown away, wasted?

Had the tears that soaked her hair as she repeated his name been shed in fear of death, or were they tears at his betrayal?

She died in despair. And nothing Snape could do, no final glorious triumph of good over evil, could change that unbearable fact.

As grey streaks of dawn leaked into the bedroom at Spinner's End, he found himself wondering whether there was comfort for either of them.

Thinking of comfort after death made Snape ponder the existence of an afterlife, an issue he was not fond of considering. In his Death-Eater days, of course, he had rejected religion as moralistic claptrap. Even in his post-Death-Eater days he was not inclined to want to believe in life after death. But that was the thing about magic: knowing that one type of supernatural experience existed made it the more likely there were others as well. Surrounded at Hogwarts by resident ghosts who were each, as he informed his DADA class, "the imprint of a departed soul" made Snape uncomfortably aware that most departed souls did not hang out at schools but went somewhere else. Where? Despite his long penance it was hard to believe that, in his case, the destination would be a pleasant one.

But if there were a heaven, Snape thought now, it would be where Lily was, and those like her—not plaster saints or incredibly flawless people, just kind ones. If there were such a place, too, surely Charity would have joined Lily there. Perhaps, even as he agonized over her death, Charity finally understood what his position was, and how it had hurt not to be able to help her. At the very least, Lily could console Charity after her grim ordeal.

Even as he thought this he saw in his mind's eye, with the sparkling clarity of a vision, Lily draping an arm over Charity's shoulder, drying her tears, helping her to walk haltingly down a long black corridor that ended in a sunburst of light. The light was so far off that he, standing at the mouth of the passage, could scarcely see it. He tried to follow, but was rooted to the spot, unable to move or speak. Once, he thought, Lily glanced back at him, but he could not read her expression, and could only pray it did not hold disappointment or reproach. _Look at me, look at me_, he begged wordlessly as the two women left him further and further behind in the darkness. _Comfort me, too; tell me I am forgiven._ But neither looked back.


	2. The Hogwarts Muggle Film Festival

Chapter Two: The Hogwarts Muggle Film Festival

On a gray February evening six months after the death of Charity Burbage, Severus Snape, now headmaster of Hogwarts, sat at dinner in the Great Hall surveying his troubled fiefdom.

At mealtimes the changes at the school over the past year were particularly dramatic. The student ranks had thinned considerably, what with the expulsion of Muggle-borns and the ominous disappearance of others, like Luna Lovegood. Yet it was not solely diminished numbers that replaced the former roar of conversation and laughter with a subdued hum. A mood hung over the hall dark as the trailing robes of dementors. Hunching their shoulders, the remaining students spoke—if they spoke at all—in tense low voices, glancing around frequently as if afraid of being overheard. Even the Slytherins, who might be expected to be happiest with the new regime, were quiet. Draco Malfoy, formerly arrogant prince of purebloods, looked downright haunted: dark circles under his eyes, he slumped in his seat, twitching at every sound.

The most immediate cause of the changed atmosphere was the pair seated to the right of Snape at the staff table: Alecto and Amycus Carrow, the brother and sister who were Voldemort's picks for, respectively, the posts of Muggle Studies and Dark Arts teachers (there was no longer a pretense of instructing students how to deflect dark magic). Pudgy, coarse, and incurably sadistic, the Carrows interpreted their job responsibilities as torturing troublesome students—which, given the constant state of covert rebellion at the school, included pretty much everyone in Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff. The Carrows' preferred method for dealing with miscreants was either to use the Cruciatus curse on them or to compel other students to do so—many of whom, resisting, were themselves cursed by those who obeyed (mainly Malfoy's erstwhile sidekicks Crabbe and Goyle). The Carrows also enjoyed using their wands to hex slashes on the hands and faces of troublemakers, which meant that these days the Great Hall resembled a camp for refugees from a war zone. On this February evening, at least twenty students sported noticeable wounds and bruises.

Reining in the Carrows while not appearing to do so was Snape's latest impossible balancing act. Relieved that being stationed at Hogwarts exempted him from being asked to commit atrocities with the Death-Eaters, he was still forced to be an apparently complicit spectator of cruelty and injustice. For, though he was nominally Headmaster, Snape was not in fact in charge of discipline, that power resting in the hex-happy hands of Alecto and Amycus. Any protest of their cruelty on Snape's part, any attempt to improve conditions, would be gleefully reported to Voldemort. Indeed, Snape suspected that the odious pair had been quartered at Hogwarts not only to enforce a reign of terror but to spy on him.

So here he was again, seemingly the ally of thugs, covertly working to restrain their excesses while being loathed by the very people he was trying to protect.

It was, of course, nothing new to Snape to be hated by students. But it was the hatred of faculty that wounded him more than he had anticipated, and certainly more than he could show. Outsider though he had been teaching at Hogwarts, Snape realized that he had come to take for granted even the limited cameraderie he shared with his colleagues. They might not like him, they might not entirely trust him, but they tacitly accepted and even respected him. Following Dumbledore's death at his hand, all that had changed. If looks could kill, he was well aware that the hostile glares of the staff would pepper him with as many arrows as a hedgehog has quills.

Minerva McGonagall's coldness hurt the most. Though in the past she had disapproved of his snarkiness with students and favoritism for Slytherins, they nevertheless had much in common: formidable intellect, high standards, a redoubtable impatience with slackness and inattention. Often, in fact, they had sat together at meals in the Great Hall, trading dry witticisms like sips of champagne. Tonight, however, though she sat at Snape's left she had moved her chair as far from his as possible. Tight-lipped, her very posture radiating disapproval, she turned her back to talk in low tones to Professors Sprout and Flitwick, the latter of whom periodically shot the Headmaster murderous looks. The diminuitive instructor had evidently not forgotten that Snape had Stupified him the night Dumbledore died, after Flitwick had raced to Snape's office to beg his help in fighting Death-Eaters. Snape had only stunned Flitwick to keep him safe from the melee, but since the Charms instructor knew nothing of this he looked, whenever he passed the Headmaster in the hall, as if his fingers were itching to grab his wand and retaliate.

No, these days Snape's only friends were the dead Headmaster's portraits, especially of course Dumbledore's.

Snape stifled an incipient sigh. As always, he could not allow himself the luxury of seeming to care.

There was only one gesture he permitted himself when the weight of ostracism and anxiety became too heavy, and he performed it now: casually brushing his hand against that spot near his heart where, secreted in an inner pocket, lurked a photo of a laughing Lily Evans and a page bearing her signature. He had cast a complicated web of spells on both scraps to make them appear blank to prying eyes. But in the privacy of his chamber he could still look at these cherished relics, and in public he could, by touching that part of his robes which hid them, gather a little courage to toil on at his thankless and Herculanean labors.

As he mulled over these things Snape's meditations were interrupted by the sound of a massive belch. Rising, Amycus Carrow slouched off to digest the mountain of food he had just consumed. Still chewing stolidly, his sister as yet showed no sign of being ready to join him. Feeling Snape's eyes on her, she looked up, unpleasantly displaying a half-masticated mouthful, and mumbled something he was unable to understand except for a word that sounded like "Longbottom."

"What?" he questioned sharply. Alecto scowled at being compelled to swallow her food but complied.

"Longbottom boy," she mumbled, "giving Amycus 'n me a load of trouble, the blood traitor. Acts out in both our classes. Can't shut him up."

She glared in the direction of the Gryffindor table. As if aware he was under discussion, Neville lifted his head and coolly met the Headmaster's gaze. Snape had to admit he was impressed. Four years ago Neville had been so afraid of Snape that the professor appeared as his boggart. Since he had joined Potter to fight at the Department of Mysteries two years ago, however, Neville had proved he possessed the courage of a true Gryffindor. As a result, these days he sported a particularly extensive selection of bruises and cuts. Snape frowned—an expression no doubt interpreted by Neville as a sign of displeasure, but in fact registering the headmaster's concern over the boy's condition. Given the relative paucity of purebloods, Amycus and Alecto probably did not intend to seriously harm any of their charges. Yet so incompetent were the duo at anything except torture that Snape could easily imagine one or the other irretriveably maiming or even killing a student by sheer accident. Looking more closely at Neville, Snape saw that one of the slashes on his cheeks was worrisomely deep and even looked infected. The headmaster would have to make sure Madam Pomfrey took a look at it—without, of course, betraying undue sympathy with rebellious students.

It was all such a headache. Snape's efforts to thwart the Carrows involved schemes which were convoluted even for him. Appalled by the reckless use of the Cruciatus curse on children, at one point he put the Carrows temporarily out of commision: if he could not buy the students a lengthy respite, he could at least give them a few days of peace. It all took careful planning, however. First he spread a rumor on a trip to the Three Broomsticks that a nasty stomach bug was making its rounds, a rumor Madam Rosmerta obligingly relayed to the other teachers. Then, a day or so later, Snape—with a sleight of hand a pickpocket might admire—sprinkled on Amycus's dinner plate a powder compounded of potion ingredients that would cause flu symptoms and a Puking Pastille from a Weasley brothers' Skiving Snackbox which Dumbledore had considerately left in a desk drawer. The ensuing, and dramatic, projectile vomiting was the more entertaining because Alecto was its target. As this also made it credible that she would "catch" her brother's ailment, Snape repeated the ruse the following evening. Unfortunately, he did not have as much fun this time since Alecto threw up all over him. Admittedly the rest of the school—including his fellow teachers—found this utterly hilarious.

And then there had been the episode where he had discovered Neville, Ginny Weasley, and Luna Lovegood removing the Sword of Gryffindor from his office, unaware that it was a fake. Shuddering to think of what would happen if the Carrows were in charge of their punishment, Snape dared to assert his right to determine it instead. In this usurpation of Carrow territory he was aided by the fact that, like most bullies, the pair were actually cowards. Though they would never admit it, Snape knew the two were afraid of him; from several comments they let fall, too, Snape gathered they were terrified of the Forbidden Forest. Thus, when the headmaster staged a particularly impressive tantrum at the students' effrontery, Alecto and Amycus were only too glad to flee the room after quickly approving the penalty of spending a night in the forest, a penalty they evidently viewed as akin to a death sentence. Though the Carrows were surprised to see the troublemakers unharmed at breakfast the next day, they seemed to assume the trio had at least been properly terrorized. Snape was certain, of course, the three had in fact had a wonderful time with Hagrid, probably laughing at Snape for thinking the outing a punishment.

But what was he to do this time to protect the students? To repeat any of his earlier ploys could arouse suspicion.

An idea began to blossom in his brain, inspiring him to ask a question that sidestepped the issue of Neville's behavior.

"So what exactly are you doing in your classes these days, Alecto? What is your curriculum?"

His drawling voice was freighted with just the right amount of lurking scorn, and he was gratified to see a shifty look come over Alecto's face. She reminded him of a child caught out in some naughtiness and determined to lie about it.

_My, my, _Snape thought,_ if the woman weren't so vile one could almost feel sorry for her. She knows that she has not the slightest credentials for teaching and is afraid of being discovered for the fraud she is._

"I read the books to them," Alecto said defensively.

"You read the books to them?" Snape asked, his tone expressing incredulity at such laziness. "That is all you do? And what are the books?"

"_The Natural Order_," answered Alecto, "and _The Great Mudblood Conspiracy_."

_Ah yes, the first a manifesto for purebloods who wished to enslave Muggles and Muggleborns, and the second a hysterical rant by a fellow so crazed he lives in a cave convinced that Muggleborns will murder him if he sets foot outside it. Just the tripe I'd expect you to pick. Although I must say I am surprised you're even literate enough to read to the students._

Of course he said none of this aloud; in fact, he said nothing at all, just gazed at her superciliously. As he suspected, she started babbling nervously.

"Well, what 'm I supposed to do?" she asked shrilly. "I mean, how many times can you say `Muggles are scum'? It's so obvious, in't it?" she appealed.

_Careful,_ Snape said to himself, _don't make her think she has to do something dramatically different; she'd probably take her classes on field trips to torture Muggles. But what could she do that would give the students a break—while not understanding what she was doing? _

And the answer came to him as smoothly and suddenly as if he had worked out the details hours ago. _But I did not_, he thought, _it was Charity's idea, though she surely never dreamed I would use her lesson plan this way._

He was remembering another scene with Charity in the teacher's lounge, a few months after the brownie incident—though on this occasion they were not alone. Instead, the lounge was filled with teachers having tea following their afternoon classes. Snape had just settled in an armchair near the fire with a pile of Potions essays, though he found himself, like others, drawn into the animated conversation between Charity Burbage and Professors McGonagall and Sprout.

"Well," Charity had been saying to them, "I'm glad I got Albus to invest in that television set and VCR."

"The what and the what?" laughed Minerva.

"Television," Charity repeated patiently. "And VCR. That's a machine you can hook up to the telly and play movies on."

"Telling vision?" Pomona laughed. "That sounds like something Sybil would do!"

Trelawney was not there to object to the comparison of the Inner Eye to Muggle electronics.

"No, no," Charity said, "Haven't you heard of Muggle television?"

"Indeed!" Filius Flitwick had piped up. "Moving pictures that tell stories. Sounds like fun—don't know why wizards haven't borrowed the idea. All we have is wireless radio. No visual stimulation at all."

"Television is a good idea!" Charity beamed, as she did whenever Muggle inventions were appreciated. "At least, it can be if there's something intelligent on, which I'll confess isn't always. Anyway, I thought I'd use the VCR to show my classes some Muggle movies—cinema, you know. It's a great way of learning about Muggle culture."

She'd had to explain the difference between television shows and movies for some of them, before Minerva had asked which films she'd be showing.

"It was hard to decide," Charity had answered. "I think I'll be doing more eventually, but I've decided on just a few to begin with. One of them is so silly, it's more for fun than anything else, though we can use it to talk about the Muggle fascination with extra-terrestials in the post-World War II period. It's an American film from the 1950s called _Plan Nine from Outer Space_, and it's a cult classic—a sci-fi film that's supposedly one of the worst films ever made."

"Of course," she'd gone on once she'd finished explaining about cult classics and sci-fi, "I have to make it very clear to the students that I'm including this one because it's too hilarious to miss, not because I'm making fun of Muggle culture in general. After all, who said the wizarding world's taste is so stellar? Just think about Celestina Warbeck, I mean honestly . . . "

"Don't tell Molly Weasley that," Minerva pointed out.

"Anyway," Charity went on, "it's a good thing to have a film to laugh at, because the next one I'm showing isn't funny at all. It's actually rather traumatic, but I feel they have to see it. It's all too relevant to our world, alas."

And she told them about a recent award-winning film called _Schindler's List_. "It's about the Holocaust," she said, "you do know what that is, don't you? When the Nazis killed millions of Jewish people in the 1940s?"

The professors had heard about this, though most knew relatively little about it. "Wasn't that during Grindelwald's time?" asked Professor Sinistra. "Do you think he influenced the Muggles' ideas somehow?"

Charity shook her head, her face somber. "I know that's a theory, but I think the Muggles would have done the same things without Grindelwald. The roots were there in Muggle culture, just as they are in wizard culture—you know, thinking of a group as subhuman, so it doesn't matter if they're all enslaved or killed.

There was a moment's silence as the others considered this point and its connection to their own history.

"But the movie is called _Schindler's List_," Minerva reminded Charity. "What list? Was Schindler a person?"

Charity's sober look gave way to her typical enthusiastic glow.

"That's the part that's inspiring," she said, "and that's why I'm showing this particular movie about the Holocaust to my students. I want them to see how, even when some people are giving into evil and hatred, others can make very different choices. Oskar Schindler was a German businessman, himself a member of the Nazi party, who became horrified by the murder of the Jews. Though he'd previously exploited his workers to make lots of money, he died penniless after helping over a thousand Jews escape death. He made a list of Jews he claimed were needed in his factories, and, despite the very real danger to his own life, he managed to talk the Nazi authorities into sparing the people on the list."

She looked pensive again. "You know, there's been some controversy about the film. There're those who complain that it idealizes Schindler, that he was really a dodgy sort who took bribes, that he was a heavy drinker, a womanizer . . ." She shrugged. "It doesn't make any difference to me, and I doubt it makes a difference to the Jews whose lives he saved. I mean, what do people expect, someone who goes around with a sign on his chest saying "hero"? Someone with a plaster halo dangling over his head?"

"That might arouse suspicion," Minerva admitted with characteristic dryness.

"Indeed," Charity replied. "No, I'm sure someone like Schindler was more likely to blend in. And anyway," she continued earnestly, "isn't it even more admirable if a man like that ends up doing the right thing than if it were someone who'd never had trouble being good? So what if Schindler was flawed—doesn't that make him finally_ more_ of a hero than less of one?"

Her gaze flicked to Snape before she looked away, a smile hovering about her lips.

Now, sitting at this table in the Great Hall several years later, Snape realized that he was about to do something that could be called poetic justice or incredible irony or just plain madness. But he had to do it. For Charity's sake. And that would be charity in more ways than one.

The thought flashed through his mind—_What would the students say if they knew I was arranging for them to have a good time? Would they ever believe it? _And he smiled slowly, his strange twisted smile that suggested not happiness so much as his having figured out the perfect method for boiling his enemies alive in toad guts. Good thing; when Alecto saw that expression she would be very, very frightened.

She did, indeed, look satisfyingly intimidated. Snape took the opportunity to move his chair fractionally closer to hers, his black eyes boring as relentlessly as a Hippogriff's into eyes which were much the same color as petrified bogeys. His right hand found his wand and slipped it out of his robes, pointing it, from a hidden position under the table, in her direction.

"Confundo," he murmured, his mind flashing back to last July and a similar session with Mundungus Fletcher. Like Fletcher's, Alecto's eyes had gone glassy and unfocused. "Tomorrow you will ask the House Elves to set up the television and VCR in the Hogwarts storeroom in your classroom, and you will give the Slytherins a week off for good behavior. Then you will ask the elves to show your classes the films they will find with the equipment. You will sleep soundly during the films, and you will forget afterwards you have done any of this. It was also never my idea; it was yours. Do you understand?"

"I unnerstand," Alecto murmured. "Elves, equipment, films, no Slytherins, my idea. Sleep durin' class."

"Good." Snape stood up. She did too, and trotted off meekly in the direction of her rooms.

He would need to watch her closely during the next few days; he had given her, like Mundungus, a lot of instructions, even more than Fletcher, really. Still, he could hover in the right place at the right time (such as the hallway outside her classroom) and repeat the Confundus charm or even use the Imperius curse to make her do exactly what he wanted. He would certainly leave her with no opportunity to realize she was showing a film about resistance to bigotry to her students, no chance to report any of this to Voldemort, and no chance for her brain to work out the analogies between Oskar Schindler and himself, although he doubted she would be capable of such advanced thought in the first place.

He wondered what the students would make of the Hogwarts Muggle Film Festival. Oh, they would laugh at _Plan Nine from Outer Space_—and they could use a laugh—while being inspired by _Schindler's List_. They would wonder why in the world their Muggle-hating teacher was showing the latter film, and probably assume she was identifying with the Nazi commander Amon Goeth and expecting them to do so too. Instead, they would find the movie gave them renewed courage to resist the Death Eaters. That might, of course, lead to more hazardous acts of bravery. Still, he had realized even before this that some of the more vociferous students would soon have to go into hiding—another thing for him to see to without the Carrows knowing.

Perhaps he should secretly watch _Schindler's List _again himself, to renew his resolve.

For he had watched the movie several years ago, after Charity described it. This project had entailed much fruitless fooling around with Muggle electronics while he worked out how to use the stuff without electrical outlets. He had found, to his astonishment, that the house elves somehow knew the proper spells, and had been struck, hard as it was to imagine, by the mental image of them curled up after their exhausting days, watching Muggle movies.

The film had mesmerized him. How he'd seen the parallels between the Nazis and the Death-Eaters, and between himself and Schindler, despite the latter's having a very different personality. Still, Snape was forcibly struck by scenes where Schindler talked the Nazi commandant into saving people's lives without realizing what he was doing. Snape imagined that, in all probability, he himself would soon be trying to pull off similar stunts with his own psychopathic master. As he had.

And now, on this February evening, walking through the halls of Hogwarts on the way to the headmaster's office, Snape's heart clenched as he remembered the scene where, after the war, Schindler blamed himself for not saving more lives. "I didn't do enough . . . I could have gotten one more person . . . and I didn't!" Perhaps some critics had objected to the scene as maudlin, claiming moreover that it had never really happened.

_Well_, thought Snape, _it probably didn't. But we always think that, we Schindlers of the world; we always blame ourselves for the ones we couldn't save. As I do with you, Charity. As I always will._

Maybe he would also have to watch again another movie that reminded him of his own situation, a film also about resistance to the Nazis that he'd include in the pile of tapes the students got to see this week. After all, he had clandestinely invested in his own copy once he knew how to use the VCR.

He'd first seen this film long ago, during his own adolescence, in the summer between his third and fourth year at Hogwarts, one night when his mother was visiting cousins and his father was sleeping off his latest alcoholic binge. Into the wee hours of the morning young Severus had sat enthralled in front of the grainy TV, even then dimly realizing that the plot would prove awfully relevant to his later life.

Yes, _Casablanca_. A romantic triangle: two men in love with the same woman, who was married to the handsome one. The ugly, craggy-faced one (the actor was so unlike the typical leading man) drowned himself in bitterness before getting a second chance to win the woman. Too noble to take it, he emerged from his cynical funk to become a freedom fighter like the woman and her husband, whose lives he saved when they almost got captured.

Snape winced. He had tried to save the lives of Lily and James. And failed.

Still, he remembered the lines the craggy-faced man had spoken at the end of the film, as he urged the woman to leave, yet again, with his rival. "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

Snape would have to remind himself how that sentiment applied to him, the sole survivor of the one-time triangle, and a very little person in a very crazy world.

Thinking of himself as little did not bother him as it once would have. It was astonishing, really, how much he'd changed during the last year. More and more the persona of supercilious, sneering Slytherin seemed to be just that, a persona, rather than some version of his real self. The temper tantrum he had thrown when he'd lost the order of Merlin four years ago seemed as remote as if it had happened when he was two. Day after day the shell in which he had wrapped himself for so long, the shell of outraged pride and inward self-hatred, fell away chip by chip. What was left behind was a kind of emptiness, though not the hollowness of loss and negation. Rather, his soul was like a once-stifling room cleared by the bracing clarity of cold air rushing in through an open window.

Soon there would be nothing left of him at all, of that he was sure. With every day his little life edged closer to its end. It would all come to a head soon; whatever Potter was doing out there would get done, and he would come back to the castle—Snape felt sure of this—to face Voldemort a final time. The boy would have to die too, Snape had learned; this still shocked him, though he could increasingly see it would take endless sacrifice to defeat the powers of darkness.

In the meantime, Snape would stay here, hidden, quiet, a force of resistance as secret as the knowing smile that used to lurk about Charity Burbage's lips when she met him in the halls.

He reached the stairway to the headmaster's office, and, having given the password of "sherbet lemon," entered the room.

The headmasters were snoozing peacefully in their frames on the wall. And, in the center of his desk, which he had left pristinely empty, lay a bright tin, like the one Charity received from her mother years before.

Snape halted in surprise. It occurred to him to be wary; after all, this could be some student prank. Yet a quickly murmured spell revealed no magic.

He prised open the lid and found himself staring at brownies, fragrant and fudgy.

His eyes swivelled to Dumbledore's portrait. But the old man continued to snore gently, though Snape thought he saw a fleeting, amused glint escape the closed eyelids.

Snape tasted a brownie. It was not so heavenly as the one he had eaten that fall afternoon in the teacher's lounge. Yet, as he leaned back in his chair in a rare attitude of relaxation and took another bite, he had to admit it was still pretty darned good.


End file.
